Cisco Survey: The Mobile Cloud Office Generation

More than half of all students and young professionals consider Internet as an “integral part of their lives,” according to Cisco’s Connected World Technology Report 2011. In fact, the report’s findings are comparable and somewhat similar to the results published in 2010, when the first such report was conducted. The next generation of leaders and workers is so accustomed to a Internet-rich life that the years to come would witness growing number of connected devices and gadgets, more mobile lifestyle and booming cloud market to meet the fast growing expectations of young people not to rely on fixed storage devices for their data and software applications they use.

The Internet is now a fundamental resource for the humankind with 33 percent of those polled considering it is of equal importance to their daily life as air, water, food, and shelter, according to the survey. Almost half of the respondents, or 49 percent of college students and 47 percent of employees, younger than 30, believe the World Wide Web and the Internet are “pretty close” to the level of importance water, food and shelter have for the human race. Overall, four of every five college students and young professionals is of opinion the Internet is vital part of their daily life although it would be interesting to see a study, asking questions why and how the Internet is vital for young peoples’ lives.

The majority of young employees, 62 percent, and 55 percent of college students polled believe their life’s daily sustenance is in jeopardy if they are denied access to the Internet, while 64 percent of students would select an Internet connection instead of a car. A very interesting choice indeed, especially in the light of global environmental issues and air pollution that cars produce globally.

Online interaction is becoming integral part of the lifestyle of the next generation with 27 percent of college students preferring to update their social network profiles, while social networks are more important to them than partying, dating, listening to music, or hanging out with friends. On paper, it should be good news for online social networks that compete fiercely in the cloud but it is an alarming trend too for contacts in person cannot be substituted by online chats, psychologists agree.

The coming customers are going to be increasingly mobile after the study found that 66 percent of college students and 58 percent of young professionals consider their mobile devices like laptops, tablets, or smarthphones “the most important technology in their lives”. Therefore, we are to witness an unprecedented growth of mobile devices and applications market with cloud services destined to play an important role in this mobile revolution due to the overwhelming volume of data people are going to store, share, and use online.

Moreover, smartphones and desktops are now equally important to the next generation: 19 percent of students believe their smartphone is their “most important device” they use daily while 20 percent consider their desktop as their ultimate device. Thus, hardware and software vendors will be forced to switch to a new type of highly mobile customers that will ask for more power, applications, functionality, and productivity offered by their smartphones. Part of the solution is shift to cloud-based services but telephone makers will be forced to seek new hardware solutions as well.

In fact, corporations would be forced to change their business and Internet strategies, including cloud adoption and cloud services, much faster than expected, according to Marie Hattar, vice president, Enterprise Marketing, Cisco. “The results of the Cisco Connected World Technology Report should make businesses re-examine how they need to evolve in order to attract talent and shape their business models. Without a doubt, our world is changing to be much more Internet-focused, and becomes even more so with each new generation,” she said in a statement.

If you believe that the Internet with its interconnected devices, cloud services, and vast amounts of data stored and shared in the cloud is as important as food and water, then you probably belong to a future generation. A generation whose idea what in the life on Earth is important and vital for the survival of the human race is very dissimilar to the mindset of many generations that inhabited this planet for centuries.

Anyway, IT companies and cloud service providers should be encouraged by the findings in the 2011 Connected World Technology Report 2011, while employers should look for new methods to attract their future employees with more than 60 percent of students polled last year not believing that work in a “classic” office adds to their productivity. Instead, they prefer to work from home or public places, connecting online to virtual offices while storing and accessing their data in the cloud. Thus, the next generation will rely on cloud services to an alarming degree, testing the abilities of both hardware and software vendors to provide, maintain, and develop a global network featuring unparalleled capabilities.

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